How to Speed Up Load Time on Your eCommerce Website

An eCommerce site’s speed is essential to its success. It has a direct impact on conversions and sales, as well as improving customer experience. Fortunately, several tried-and-true methods can quickly speed up your eCommerce store and increasing conversions. So, do you want your eCommerce site to load faster? Take a look at these points. 

Get rid of obsolete plugins

E-commerce stores employ extensions and plugins to improve their functionality. However, some may be beneficial on the one hand, while others may be harmful. A large amount of bespoke functionality, poor quality, unstable code, and other difficulties discovered in third-party integrations might cause the website to load slowly. Begin by reviewing all third-party features while considering the benefits and drawbacks. Then remove any plugins that are no longer needed or don’t provide enough functionality. You can also correct any code in plugins that is causing issues with the website’s operation.

Use high-quality payment gateways

High-quality payment gateways can also help you cut load time. That said, it’s critical to comprehend how the quality of payment gateways may assist you in real-time defense attacks by acting as an encryption buffer between the buyer and the retailer. As a tip, utilize well-known payment gateways like Stripe. Using Stripe to manage your businesses online payments ensures that your customers’ credit card information is gathered directly on the third-party site. Additionally, use SSL on your website to ensure that the communication between your website and payment gateways is always encrypted.

Track performance regularly 

Don’t get too comfortable once you’ve completed the performance optimization and your current website load time is satisfactory. This does not guarantee you’ll never have to deal with this problem again. That said, you add new products to the store, make minor modifications to the website design, or significant changes to the platform’s unique functionality. That’s why you should use one of the tools listed above to track performance metrics regularly. This allows you to react quickly and resolve even the tiniest issue before it causes damage to your website.

Optimize images to enhance load times

Any eCommerce store would be incomplete without images. It’s a good idea to spend some time optimizing product photos, thumbnails, and other elements to enhance page load times. TinyPNG, for example, is a WordPress plugin that compresses and optimizes photos as you post them. Lazy loading of images is another technique that can be used in this situation. 

The term “lazy loading” refers to images that are not loaded until the user scrolls down to the section of the page where they are located. The total page load time is not affected because the browser does not have to load all images at once. BJ Lazy Load, a WordPress plugin, may let you do this right away. Because most of your online store’s media material will be in the form of photos, image optimization and lazy loading can be helpful.

Minimize redirect links

If you must utilize redirects, keep them to a minimum. Each re-route sends a separate request to the server, lengthening your page’s load time. Frequently, retailers keep redirection from old links to new ones. When most customers use new URLs directly, these redirects should be eliminated for the best results.